Bake Bing's Sugar Cookies

A new cookbook shows us how to bake like Bing Crosby and other stars of Christmas past

by Susan Toepfer

Photograph: Everett Collection

Sirius XM radio host Frank DeCaro longs for the days of Christmas movies and specials past. “There was an inherent glamour back then, combined with a homespun quality,” he says of the images he watched in the ’60s and ’70s. “Dinner was wonderful, snow fell at the right moment, then someone broke out in song. Those stars knew what they were doing.”

DeCaro’s new book, Christmas in Tinseltown: Celebrity Recipes and Hollywood Memories from Six Feet Under the Mistletoe, combines inside glimpses of seasonal classics like White Christmas (starring Bing Crosby, left) with instructions for making such holiday hits as Judy Garland’s Ham Casserole with Sherry.

Did Judy really tie on a reindeer apron? “I hope the recipes are genuine,” DeCaro says of the collection he compiled from vintage cookbooks, magazines and supermarket flyers. “I like to believe the stars cooked them—or had someone prepare them.”